The photo on the bottom, right of the girl winking is the Wani Special print. Each print is numbered/signed by Range Murata. He's personally signed/numbered prints in the past, so it's the same sort of thing.

It's really heavy. The exterior box is also not a shipping box this time. I didn't expect it to be like this.. If you look at Wani's page, the first image of a white cover is the actual box. It is white cardboard with sqaure dots on it. The second image on top is form|code inside it's black slip case. The third image on top (right) is form|code, the actual collection.

He put a lot of his old doujin art in this release, like the two poster collection that came with a strap & poster tube, 1997 calendar prints, and prints from Concurrence. If you don't already own his older doujinshi, then you don't need to buy them now because the prints are inside of form|code and nicer quality. Even the art used for his desktop doujin calendars (2000-2002) is inside.... form|code seems more like a compilation of older releases (like 1997-2002 doujinshi art and all of his afterservice works since it first appeared as a feature of Kairakuten monthly) reproduced with nicer quality and neatly compiled into a binder. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing because there's not much new art.

Wow. Form|code is already sold out! Wani has zero stock, and after filling their orders, they only filled first submission orders from stores. I had a feeling they would short the market this time. Fortunately, all of our orders are covered, but we have ZERO extra copies. I wonder how many stores outside of Japan will get shorted...

Did you know there was a production limit? I didn't know. Wani only made 8000 copies total, and when we bumped into Range Murata, he was heading there to sign a couple thousand(!) prints. Based on his comment, Wani must have kept a minimum of 25% for direct pre-sales and then more for sales via their site after its release.

Unfortunately, we only have two copies remaining of the Wani Special. I'm really disappointed to see that they shorted stores in the end because we had actually confirmed before and after our second order that Wani still had lots of unsold stock.

Not surprising that Amazon has stock. I'm sure they have a very big budget that allows them to freely buy as much as they want far in advance of a product's release... Please don't get me wrong. I didn't say all stores are sold out. I said Wani is sold out, so stores won't be able to restock, and many stores did not receive all copies on order. For us, we have zero remaining but I didn't know that until we went to pay for some items today. They didn't even tell us. We had to ask when the other half of our form|code order would arrive, and apparently, it will never arrive.

It is surprising to read that Amazon is charging more for form|code now because it's illegal for a store to manipulate prices on Japanse publications if they store sells on the Japanese market. That's why nearly every import book, JP toy or JP DVD is marked down at Amazon.co.jp, but the Japanese books are always listed at Japanese retail price. According to Japanese law, stores in Japan are not allowed to charge more or less than a book's Japanese retail price. The JP retail price is typically printed on the product (with and without tax) for your protection because stores are not allowed to change it. The rule only applies to products released by a Japanese publisher with a Japanese ISBN. The product must also be purchased by the store via wholesale for sales on the Japanese market. Even Wani is required to sell their own books at exact JP retail if they choose to sell directly to consumers. At most, a store can offer a bonus to be competitive, like point cards, phone cards, free shipping, free bonus item (provided the free item was not produced for resale purposes), etc. Similarly, every single store in Japan pays the same wholesale price, and all distributors make the same profit. It's some strange law with the Japanese book industry that prevents price wars, favortism, etc. Everything must be equal, so if the small shop on the corner orders 2 copies of a book and the big shop on the other corner orders 200 copies of a book, then the small one gets 1 and the big one gets 100 if only 50% of all orders for the one book can be filled. Regardless of demand and supply, the law states the price must not vary from retail.

Anyways, I'm just grumbling because it appears (this is just my opinion) that Wani delayed the release to simply get more direct sales because we saw form|code at the Comiket and it was already complete, pending mass production. Plus, they suddenly shipped it without warning to distributors, and also shorted them without any notice. typical really.

Last edited by val on April 4th, 2006, 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

hmm...at the time i placed my order they had it for 9500Y and when I went to cancel it last week it was upto 9975Y. Maybe they were giving a discount on early pre-orders? dunno..just something interesting I noticed.

MrDisco wrote:hmm...at the time i placed my order they had it for 9500Y and when I went to cancel it last week it was upto 9975Y. Maybe they were giving a discount on early pre-orders? dunno..just something interesting I noticed.

The book's retail is Â¥9500 + 5% tax = Â¥9975. When you went to cancel, you probably saw the total with tax, and when you ordered, you proably noticed the price before tax. The price may have been noted with the kanji for 'tax excluded' when you ordered, or they may have listed it without tax in error.

Japanese book stores are not permitted to give preorder discounts. It is honestly illegal when it comes to books in Japan. A Japanese store will never charge less or more than the retail price on the Japanese market. The retail price will _never_ vary in Japan. Although, some stores like Toranoana, KBooks, and Mandarake will actually sell new stock from their book store to their 'used' store, and then raise the price. All of the doujin stores do that with doujinshi too, and at times, they don't take the 'new' store's price tag off, but instead they stick a higher price from the 'used' store on top of the original price. I guess that's one way to get around Japan's law on book pricing.